These days, pirates get up to their ne'er-do-welling at car boot sales, rather than on the high seas. Future Gamer investigate.
Paul Rose

It's been a long time since piracy evoked images of seawater-flecked reprobates wearing tricorn hats with eyepatches and parrots and stuff. The modern pirate is more at home in a filthy bedsit than the high seas, and is more likely to type the words 'wAreZ RuLEz' in an Internet chatroom than yell things like 'Hoist the mainbrace' from a crow's nest. Nevertheless, piracy is alive and well.

If you've ever been to a car boot sale, it's more than likely you've encountered sweaty, overweight men standing behind trestle tables, offering golden CDs professing to contain multiple PlayStation or PC titles at a fraction of the price you'd pay in a shop. It doesn't take Poirot to realise that these alfresco retailers are up to no good.

According to games industry trade body ELSPA (the European Leisure Software Publishers Association), £3 billion is lost every year through software piracy. Jobs are axed as a result, and pirated software is often mixed in with obscene material or used to fund terrorist activity.

Piracy has come a long way since the days when youths would surreptitiously hand over a C-90 to a friend in double physics, knowing that the next morning it'd be returned stuffed to the gills with ZX Spectrum games. As the games industry has grown, so has software theft.

Mr Boot Sale is only part of the problem; in Asia and the Far East, piracy is virtually an unstoppable force. Illegally copied games, and even counterfeit hardware, are openly sold in shops and marketplaces, with little threat of arrest for either the pirates or those selling the pirated software. Efforts from the likes of Nintendo and Electronic Arts to stop this flood appear about as effective as trying to extinguish the sun with a polythene dust sheet attached to the end of a broom.